Microsoft is making it easier to use a Git repository with Team Foundation Server, and has added a kanban board to its Team Foundation Service cloud platform.

A kanban board shows the set of tasks still waiting to be completed as a status board with colors showing the status. The board is designed to help team members get a clearer picture of which items are overdue or causing delays when using Scrum or kanban agile methods.

The board has been added to Team Foundation Service in recognition of the growing interest in the kanban methodology, according to a blog post by Brian Harry, Microsoft technical fellow for TFS. He says:

"Now you can manage your project with Scrum, with kanban, or you can combine them to get the best of both by using kanban visualize the flow of your Scrum backlog items. Scrum and kanban are both work management strategies that involve breaking down a problem and then visually transitioning work through a series of states."

You can watch a video of the board in action:

The addition to Team Foundation Server is less pretty but possibly more useful. It is a set of command-line tools called Git-tf to make it straightforward to use a local Git repository.

The tools will mean you can check out a project from the server into the local Git repository. You’ll then be able to use git commands to edit, commit, revert, branch and merge the repository. The changes can then be synced back to the TFS server using Git-tf. Microsoft has also launched a Git-tf open source project on its Codeplex project site.

The thinking behind the addition of the tools was explained by Brian Harry in another blog post where he outlines a situation where most of a development team are working in Visual Studio or Eclipse, but at the same time there are developers who want or need to use Git.

“Maybe they are the XCode developers on the team and they like the native Git integration in the XCode IDE. Git-tf allows them to work with XCode's Git integration and collaborate with other team members through TFS."

The plan is that support for Git-tf will also be added to Team Foundation Service.

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